Iran Nuclear Scientist Murdered: Real 007 Shit!

[3113]

So, as you may have heard, an Iranian Nuclear Scientist was killed--but what you might not have heard--or read up on beyond the headlines--was how he was killed. It was right out of a 007 novel--or more accurately, right out of some spy-like action thriller. Makes me wonder if the idea was actually lifted from such a movie, making the screenwriter nominally responsible.

It seemed a clockwork killing: Motorcycle riders flashed by and attached a magnetic bomb onto a car carrying a nuclear scientist working at Iran's main uranium enrichment facility. By the time the blast tore apart the silver Peugeot, the bike was blocks away, weaving through Tehran traffic after what Iran calls the latest strike in an escalating covert war.

The attack — which instantly killed the scientist and fatally wounded his driver on Wednesday — was at least the fourth targeted hit against a member of Iran's nuclear brain trust in two years.

 

[sr71plt]

All of the markings of Israel's Mossad.

 

[TE999]

All of the markings of Israel's Mossad.

Ding, ding, ding! we have a winner!

The Mossad make the CIA, NSA, MI5, the KGB/GRU, the Surete' and their ilk look like pikers.

 

[sr71plt]

Ding, ding, ding! we have a winner!

The Mossad make the CIA, NSA, MI5, the KGB/GRU, the Surete' and their ilk look like pikers.

NSA doesn't have a covert arm. It's a stay-at-home research agency.

 

[3113]

NSA doesn't have a covert arm.

Ha! That you know of

 

[sr71plt]

Ha! That you know of

That anyone in the know knows of, actually.

 

[estragon]

If it was Mossad, they made up for that terrible blunder in the Emirates, where they used phony passports and got photographed on the surveillance cameras in the hotel. The British went doolally because their nationals had their passports knocked. If it was them, they've certainly cleaned up their act.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Or, he was junior enough to be expendable for 'political expediency' reasons. This is the Middle East where Byzantine politics was born . . . before there ever was a Byzantium!

 

[estragon]

VM, now that you mention it, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it was an inside job for political reasons.

 

[ManInIronMask]

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan's precise role in the Iran nuclear program will shed more light on whether this was a covert op or an inside job. Either way, a magnetic device on a car to make a kill - whoa!

 

[ishtat]

Is it necessary or desirable for NSA to be independent of CIA or FBI or Homeland Security?

Is it reasonable for NSA to refuse to share original intelligence data with other agencies? (if that is their policy, I've seen conflicting reports)

Any opinions whether NSA shortcomings in warning other agencies contributed to 9/11? Their work doesn't seem to have been examined, or their performance rigorously questioned at least publicly.

Any assumptions in these questions are based on my lack of knowledge but the two fundamental questions which interest me are:

Is NSA as effective or accountable as it should be?

Are there too many competing agencies fighting each other for territory and influence rather than getting the job done?

I know it's a bit of a thread jack but I sometimes wonder whether all the US agencies know what the others are doing --- let alone what Mossad might be up to.

 

[sr71plt]

Is it necessary or desirable for NSA to be independent of CIA or FBI or Homeland Security?

Is it reasonable for NSA to refuse to share original intelligence data with other agencies? (if that is their policy, I've seen conflicting reports)

Any opinions whether NSA shortcomings in warning other agencies contributed to 9/11? Their work doesn't seem to have been examined, or their performance rigorously questioned at least publicly.

Any assumptions in these questions are based on my lack of knowledge but the two fundamental questions which interest me are:

Is NSA as effective or accountable as it should be?

Are there too many competing agencies fighting each other for territory and influence rather than getting the job done?

I know it's a bit of a thread jack but I sometimes wonder whether all the US agencies know what the others are doing --- let alone what Mossad might be up to.

The CIA and FBI are no longer nominally independent of each other. With the change of umbrella management under the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) (who was also the director of the CIA but who didn't have FBI under his line authority) to being under a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) after the 9/11 upheaval, the CIA and FBI supposedly are under the same super director. NSA was under the DCI before but isn't under the DNI now (which even then people were saying was a mistake in the legislation). Homeland Security, a relatively new agency is off doing its own thing.

The CIA and FBI traditionally husbanded their own information and weren't good at sharing it. This mainly was because each agency was good at protecting its own sources of information and also good at exposing the sources of the other agency. I doubt that's changed--or will change--much no matter what their shared line of command structure might be.

NSA is the largest of all of the U.S. intell organizations, and, no, I never found it particularly helpful. Not on purpose but because of the nature of its collection paradigm. It uses the hoover technique, pulling in as many raw signals messages as it can collect, storing it all willy-nilly in one big lump, and then trying to pull useful information out of it for analysis. (Think finding a pin in a garbage dump.)

So, I doubt it could have been much help on 9/11. Folks are happy to point to specific known-after-the-fact designators that, when linked up with other designators, gave clear signals of what was going on. Nobody seems to realize that those signals were mixed in with loads of irrelevant, undigested garbage until someone backtracked from what could have been known to what was originally available.

In my experience, NSA doesn't refuse to share information. It genuinely can't find what is needed/relevant in what is needed now from all of that garbage it collects and only translates and analyzes partially "maybe" sometime later.

In most of its programs, the CIA's approach is to start with the question of what it's looking for and then start tasking the collectors and digging in its various collection programs for the relevant bits of information answering that question. The danger here is asking the right questions and having the relevant means to find the bits of information. (Gauging the reliability of the information source and the actual relevancy of the information are problems for both of the approaches.) It was the Agency, using this approach, that found Osama Bin Ladin--not NSA (or the military guys who went in and shot him--they weren't either the directional device or the gun--they were the bullet).

Yes, there are too many intelligence offices--more than 100 under the DNI, which doesn't even include such key collection and analysis agencies as the biggest, NSA; or the most costly, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO); or Homeland Security. Just because one person is organizationally responsible for large numbers of these offices (once the DCI, now the DNI) doesn't mean they share all of their information--and there's only a small organization that puts it all together from any of this sharing anyway--and what they are doing is working on major targets.

Terrorism in the United States was a major intelligence target in 2001, certainly--and had been for decades--but it was so in terms of macro organization, not in terms of a small cell managing to bring 9/11 off. The CIA had once been the intell coordination organization, but as intell offices (mostly in the military community) proliferated, they just didn't give it all for combining and coordinated analysis. With 9/11, there was another major "effectiveness" hurdle. The FBI's jurisdiction stopped at the borders on the U.S. side, and the CIA's jurisdiction stopped at the other side of that border. The terrorists don't have any such barriers. Although those barriers for U.S. intell have become blurred, they are still mostly there, as far as I know.

 

[ishtat]

Thanks for the comment at post 12. it is difficult to form a view without knowing more of these organizations but whilst CIA deserves credit for finally locating Bin Laden I guess they also have to bear their share of responsibility for taking a decade to do it. However the NSA doesn't seem to have laid a glove on him in the same period, despite having the budget and technical capacity to pick up every signal made world wide. Insofar as I have a view it is that NSA's existence is damaging to effective intelligence work because :

1 They attract and compete for budget that would be better spent elsewhere.

2 Their method is unduly attractive to politicians because it doesn't have the nasty(perceptions) downside potential of FBI/CIA work.

3 The creation of Homeland security is problematic because it duplicates and again competes for business with other agencies.

More rationalization is needed, and I doubt any competent CIA director is going to be overly fussed by an apparently cosmetic creation the - DNI.

 

[trysail]

LOL.


Bureaucrats in a colossal bureaucracy aren't capable of tieing their own shoelaces. What a profound insight!

 

[sr71plt]

I doubt any competent CIA director is going to be overly fussed by an apparently cosmetic creation the - DNI.

Well, they would be, I think. Because what was given to the DNI as a job came out of what had been the jazzier parts of the CIA director's job--including the cabinet seat the DCI once had.

 

[JackLuis]

U.S. has ‘some ideas’ who killed Iran scientist: Panetta

“I’m not sure who was involved. We have some ideas as to who might be involved. But we don’t know exactly who was involved,” he added.

Probably doesn't want to know really.

 

[Loring2]

All of the markings of Israel's Mossad.

How true ... how true ... my boys, and girls at work and play.

 

[werdsmith]

I think if it were the Mossad or any of the alphabet boys from the USA, it wouldn't have been so....messy.

My guess is that it was another Middle Eastern country trying to make everyone think it was us or the Mossad. None of the other governments over there want Iran to have the bomb any more than we do.

 

[sr71plt]

I think if it were the Mossad or any of the alphabet boys from the USA, it wouldn't have been so....messy.

What messy? It was pretty slick--at least from what's been reported.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

To my mind it was quite neatly done. The bomb was apparently a shaped charge that killed the target instantly. That the driver was collateral damage was one of those "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Sam" kind of things. No bystanders were hurt and almost no damage to the surrounding infrastructure occurred. I call that downright surgical.

 

[werdsmith]

my messy, I mean...public. Someone saw the guys on the bikes, there was an explosion in a public place, kids could have gotten hurt, etc.

If it were 'real' 'James Bond' stuff, someone would have gotten a Skil Saw blade yo-yo in their sleep, poison, silenced Walther, etc.

 

[sr71plt]

Again, I don't see anything messy by world intell organization standards--certainly not the Israelis. (They've bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities at least three times that I know of. I don't think they gave a warning or counted civilian noses down there before they did it.)

Those would be Iranian kids, wouldn't they? Been following what's been going on on the streets of Iraq for a couple of decades?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

It certainly could. And a strike like that wouldn't be hard to put together. Motorbikes are easy, as are ski masks and magnets. All they'd need was a can with a cone inside and the area behind the cone full of (your choice here) explosive. Somehow in a regime as corrupt and Byzantine as Iran's I don't find that too hard to imagine. It's right out of some contemporary NYT best seller. James Bond, my foot! He's so over-the-hill.

 

[JackLuis]

Odd allies we have.

Mossad 'posed as CIA to recruit fighters'
Magazine report claims Israeli spies used fake US spy identities to work with Pakistani fighters targeting Iran.

I suppose Mossad is probably behind the magnet bomb somewhere.

 

[Handley_Page]

" The attack — which instantly killed the scientist and fatally wounded his driver on Wednesday — was at least the fourth targeted hit against a member of Iran's nuclear brain trust in two years. "


I love the subtle difference between them. The Scientist is 'instantly killed' while the poor driver merely "fatally wounded".
Is there some difference here that I'm missing ?